Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Oh yeah, forgot to talk about the rowing thing. See, I'm like, an expert on rowing because I like, rowed at school. My input here will therefore be very valuable to you all. Pretty much, my experience taught me that the culture of rowing is psycho, but hilarious. First of all, at a school level it's all these pretty quite precious girls doing what is quite frankly a gross sport. The Yarra river is unlean. The gunge is real, the blisters are real. It's gross. Also, something about my sculling technique was so bad that I would graze my stomach on every stroke [my gut may have had something to do with it] and hack away at my hands with my fingernails as they crossed over each other after the tap down. As a result, my rowing top would be covered in blood by the end of a session and I had a band of scarred epidermis on my belly for years. So, really. Rowing's gross. I ended up having to wear gloves because of the hand hacking thing. I'm not getting to the hilarious part yet, I know, but I swear it's crazy funny. Rowing's psycho, but if you're not psycho too, you can really piss yourself about it. Like, if you're not actually scared of the people yelling at you, they look really funny and ridiculous. I consider myself non-psycho and knowledgeable, so here's my [just pasted in from the comments section of the antiblog of Hana] take on "what's up with that rowing thing?":

It's a rowing thing. You wouldn't understand. Rowing is an arsehole sport. Like, when I read that this girl had stopped rowing 300 metres from the finish out of physical exhaustion, I went, "Oh shit, she is gonna be hated forever and ever." Like, I can just picture rowers at the Yarra boatsheds huddling together in groups saying all sorts of shitty things about her, and about the selection process that let this 'soft cunt' through. Seriously, I would put money on those exact words being a feature on the Yarra this week. Really, rowing is an arsehole sport. I only did schoolgirl rowing, and I was always quite nonchalant about it. I used to laugh at the strange 20-something men and women rowers who coached us, and taunt them by going, "yeah yeah, it's only rowing. Chill out." I always thought there was a kind of sadism to them, how they relished making young girls freak. I think some of them found me kinda infuriating, how I wouldn't get shitty or turn on my crew members after a race or a practice session had gone bad. Anyway, what I find most hilarious about it is how during races they cycle alongside the river just yelling obscenities at young girls. It's an hilarious sight to behold. Kinda sick too. And I remember this one time we were at rowing camp at Nagambie, racing in different combinations to fill the last spot in the first crew. We'd been going at it all morning, race after race after race to see which girl went faster with us. And then the girl behind me started throwing up the banana she'd had for breakfast. So I called over to the coach, like, "We have to stop, Lou is puking." And the coach was like, "Are you fucking kidding me? We've barely started. This is the softest crew I've ever seen!" Ha ha ha. Good times.